Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (Wounds of Passion)

By bell hooks

Book Overview

"bell hooks's brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence." --Gloria Steinem
With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer's journey in Wounds of Passion. She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carved out of words, lighting the way for all writers who would tread in her wake.
This memoir is an illuminating vision of a writer's life from one of America's treasured authors.
"I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us." --Maya Angelou

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805057226
• ISBN13: 9780805057225
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

bell hooks rocks

Wounds of Passion by bell hooks is an autobiography that explains the struggles of a very independent-nonconforming-feminist-black-woman-writer from the South struggling through a difficult childhood then later trying to adapt to the "foreignness" of the academic world of California. Just like hooks, this book is not easily placed into a clearly defined category. It could be at home among works of women's studies, feminism, African-American studies, cultural criticism, or autobiographies, just to name a few. This book is not merely a memoir of bell hooks' writing life. It presents several strong statements about American society and how difficult it is (even down to the family level) to be independent and to challenge the status quo. She calls the reader to bear witness to her pain and struggles throughout her life as a black female writer.Two intertwining voices throughout the book make it a very interesting and unique narrative. As one voice is telling the story through time as the events are happening, another voice is looking back at these events as a third person in the here-and-now. This gives a reader more than the normal single-perspective and brings the reader a little closer to the story she's telling.One of the many statements hooks makes with Wounds of Passion is blackness does not have a universal truth. This is exemplified by the following quote explaining the fundamental differences between her and her boyfriend Mack (who was born and raised in California) throughout their long, rocky relationship. Hooks explains, "He does not feel the pain of Jim Crow. Shared black skin does not draw them closer. Her kinda blackness is strange to him. His kinda blackness I've heard about but find it hard to believe" (52).Many social issues surface in Wounds of Passion such as domestic violence, conflicting feminist views among black and white women, racial issues of the South, stereotypes, issues of social class, and several others. But hooks does not preach or prescribe any concrete "solutions" to these problems. She seems to merely want people to recognize these problems exist, and with that acknowledgment, be taking the first step in the overall solution.She speaks many times about how poetry and words are a place for her to escape from the harsh reality of everyday life and how she moves beyond the boundaries of race and class through books (105). "Poetry is a place of transcendence" (109). Poetry is often a place where gender and race is not usually evident or important in the words and their meanings.Although there's never any doubt that bell hooks is a feminist black woman, she says in the following quote about two good friends of her and Mack: "Their gayness is both significant and not solely defining. This is how she wants to feel about blackness, that it can always be significant without being the only aspect of her identity that matters. The same is true of being a woman" (237-238). This outlook will hopefully be the "norm" someday. Wou

Amazingly expressive writer!

My first Bell Hooks book...interesting. She takes the meaning of writing, words, poetry, living, loving, and being....to a whole 'nother' level.

bell hooks has done it again!

It's very rare for me to cry while I'm reading a book, but this title made me do so over and over again. I found myself nodding in agreement and shouting "amen" as if I were in church. This is one of my favorites and it has a place of honor on my bookshelf.